Dive Brief:
- When tablets were introduced to college campuses, many expected them to be put to use as a classroom tool, but campus support services, including security, food services and administration, are finding innovative and efficient ways to use tablets, according to Ed Tech Magazine. Many report it allows them to focus on their tasks as opposed to filling out paperwork.
- Ed tech consultant Bryan Alexander said tablets were often best used as a kind of digital clipboard, to quicken the pace at which students and staff can complete and transmit documents to expedite a process. Tablets are often used for situations where paper forms were previously necessary, such as a safety incident report, or to replace internal systems like in a school's cafeteria.
- The photo option on tablets can be of great use to maintenance crews, for example, when they have to make decisions about how best to use their limited resources in the most helpful manner. Describing a pothole may not necessarily carry the same weight as seeing a photo of a pothole that could do significant damage to a vehicle, Washburn University CIO James Tagliareni said.
Dive Insight:
Tablets may be increasing in popularity among faculty and staff on college campuses, but for students, the most popular device by a significant degree remains laptops, according to a Campus Technology survey from last month. The 2017 Teaching with Technology Survey asked faculty about the most popular devices among students, and 57% reported students used laptops the most, with 33% reporting mobile phones were the most popular. Only 6% noted tablets as the most popular, while only 1% reported the same for Chromebooks (this is a different case than in K-12 schools, where Google currently reigns supreme — according to TechCrunch, Google is in 58% of K-12 schools in the country, with Windows in 22% and MacOS or iOS systems in 19%).
However, students are increasingly bringing as many as three or four different devices onto campus, according to Oral Roberts University CIO Mike Mathews, who cautioned that there needs to be increased awareness of personal security measures among faculty, staff and students in a recent Education Dive interview concerning the way campus CIOs counter cyber threats. As schools increasingly transition from using paper records to conducting more business on devices, they must also invest in cybersecurity and cyber awareness. As tablet use becomes more uniform outside of IT and CIO departments, it will be in the hands of more employees who may not be as familiar with security measures. Coupled with the learning curve inherent with new devices, colleges and universities will benefit in the long run if they put more investment into security training at the start of the rollout of new devices.